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Thursday, February 12, 2015

Bidar to get rationed water supply

From tomorrow, people to get water twice a week

With Bidar staring at an unprecedented situation of water scarcity, officials are forced to ration water supply for the city. From Wednesday, the city will get water twice a week. The old city areas will get water on Monday and Wednesday, while the new city and the extension areas will get water on Tuesday and Thursday.

Work on the bulk water supply project is complete. Around 65 lakh litres of water is being filtered at the water purification plant in Neelammanahalli everyday.

“We decided to stagger water supply, after calculating the availability of water for the next few months,” P.C. Jaffer, Deputy Commissioner, said after a meeting of officials on Monday. He hoped that one or two spells of heavy rain in March –April would address the issue.

The depleting levels of water in the Karanja reservoir, that supplies water to the city, have led to this situation. Inflow is nearly zero as the district suffered over 40 – 60 per cent scarcity of rainfall. Similarly, there was scarce rain in the catchment areas of the Karanja in Telangana and Maharashtra.

Irrigation Department officials feel that another cause for the low water level is the impounding of water in the Kottur barrage in Telangana, which is a shared catchment area for the Karanja river. “That barrage supplies water to two crop a year, while we release water only once a year,” officials said.

The department was forced to release water during the rabi season as farmers sought protection to standing crop after the delayed rain. “We anticipated that the returning monsoon would fill the reservoir. But we did not get enough rains,’’ farmers said.

Irrigation officials say the problem has been compounded by farmers who draw water from the backwaters and sides of the reservoir. “Most of these irrigation pump sets are neither registered with the government. These need to be regulated,” a senior engineer said.